Splitsville SCUMBAGS TRIUMPHANS

The Gently Ageing Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Okay, yes, granted: Donald Trump is a loathsome shithead. And the people around him, which is to say, the entire Republican Party and the “tech bro” billionaires? Well, to paraphrase Marc Antony in Julius Caesar: So are they all, all loathsome shitheads.

So why did so many people vote for him? Why do people vote for any Republican? Who in their right mind sends Tommy Tuberville or Ted Cruz to the U.S. Senate? How could anyone vote for Marjorie Taylor Greene with a straight face?

It is a mystery! Right?

Well, no. Not if you accept the thesis that half the country—or at least half the electorate—are scumbags. As the saying goes, “Game recognizes game.” Unless that has something to do with the ability of elks or deer to identify each other, what it means is: It takes one to know one. Scumbags recognize one of their own, and vote accordingly.

You may note that this theory is slightly at variance with previous theories we’ve advanced, such as, “half the country is very stupid, and so believes Trump’s obvious lies.” Still, it didn’t take much for us to entertain this alternate analysis—especially when it is put forth by Roy Edroso, an excellent (and hilarious) Substack blogger, in an entry entitled “The Scumbaggery Is The Point.”

Trump was reelected on what he advertised, which was the same as what he advertised in 2016, and that wasn’t the price of eggs. (Every time he yelled about inflation, it was clear he didn’t even know what it was, and it didn’t matter.)

He advertised deranged fantasies of brown-skinned refugees eating suburban pets, his opponent pretending to be black, and tariffs, the latest version of A Wall And Mexico Will Pay For It. He advertised his own thuggish behavior, his evident disdain for anyone weaker than him, and his limitless self-regard, every time he appeared in public.

Edroso’s reply to our touching, plaintive “Don’t these idiot voters see what Trump is?” would be, “Yes, they do. And they dig it.” Of course, Trump isn’t like other Republicans, in that he’s much, much worse. But that doesn’t keep them from trying to measure up, or, rather, down.

Then there’s the stuff his goons get up to on their own accord — for example, demanding that California make concessions if they want any federal assistance for their catastrophic fires from the Scumbag in Chief…

The Republicans justify their crude threats with gibberish about how California’s fires are not the fault of climate change and its attendant droughts but the fault of “Gavin Newsom prioritizing a fish over his citizens or a leader like Karen Bass, the mayor, who prioritizes DEI initiatives over the readiness of first responders…”

But these idiotic charges are not meant to convince anyone — not even the people who vote Republican. They are rather pure displays of scumbaggery — made-up shit, like when a bully accuses a nerd of stepping on his foot so he can stuff him in a locker.

All this raises several questions. Why are people like this? Why do they approve of this kind of garbagio behavior by their (supposed) representatives in government? Don’t they know that government is supposed to help make life better for them, and not simply worse for others?

Answer: No, they don’t know that. Contemporary capitalism has given them plenty to worry and complain about, from the disappearance of decent jobs to the high cost of housing, health care, and education. And, since Reagan, they’ve been told who’s to blame: minorities, “welfare queens,” Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, trans people, immigrants, feminists, liberals, and government itself. These appeals to the crudest kinds of bigotry and misogyny have left these people stupid, yes—try defending government, and you can throw your shoulder out by pointing to Social Security, Medicare, the FDA, the minimum wage, disaster relief, FEMA, and the origins of the fucking internet itself, and all you’ll get back is a brain-dead, “Yeah? So?” But it’s also left them mean.

These are the people to be found in the schoolyard bully’s entourage. They’re the ones who cheer and snigger when the asshole beats up a smaller kid and steals his lunch money (and then keeps it all for himself). They put George W. Bush in the White House twice. They sent Mitch McConnell to the Senate and Jim Jordan to the House. They made—of all people—Donald Trump president and then, just to show how little they cared for competence, decency, and character, they did it again.

We’ve said MAGA is a cult, which captures the quasi-religious (i.e., irrational) aspect of today’s Republican Party and its literally insane Trump-worship. But it also embodies politics-as-suicide-pact. “We, the people of the proud MAGA hordes, will use the system to vote you and your (not-the-slightest-bit-elitist) billionaire pals into office, so you can destroy the system and, in so doing, own the libs. It’ll be bad for you as well as for us, but at least it’ll show that bitch Pelosi who’s boss.”

Of course, the tricky thing about a suicide pact is trust: Alice and Bob can agree to off themselves, but once Alice does her part, how can she be sure Bob will follow through? If he doesn’t, she’s in for a rude awakening, albeit from the standpoint of being dead.

That’s the fate that awaits the scumbag masses who voted for Trump. They will suffer. He won’t. (He’ll probably drop dead of burgers and diet Coke before his campaign of destruction can come to fruition anyway.) Someone should tell them that!

Not that they’d listen. As Edroso notes, both about Republican office-holder scumbags and about the scumbags who put them in office:

But the point these scumbags seek to make is not solely or even mainly about their policies — remember, Republicans don’t have policies as such. It’s about themselves, how terrible (in every sense) they are, and making themselves anti-heroes to people who feel helpless and hopeless and have been left by late-stage capitalism absolutely unable to imagine any better way out of it than to join the people who want to burn it all down.

Like we said—half the electorate. It’s yet another aspect of Splitsville, that schizoid-nutty state in which two countries occupy the same geo-political border. It would be nice if they only burned their half down, but it doesn’t work that way: both halves are in the same place! It’s enough to make one yearn for a real-life Split.